


no shadow where there shines no sun

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [91]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, Magic, Necromancy, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:01:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26787121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: The cost is simple: a life for a life, exchanged slowly over time. As Loki grows stronger, Thor will grow weaker. A worthy trade.
Relationships: Loki & Thor (Marvel), Loki/Thor (Marvel)
Series: Dark Month Collection [91]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/57298
Comments: 6
Kudos: 36





	no shadow where there shines no sun

**Author's Note:**

> Day 2 of October. I had a bad day and got really close to not writing this at all. Prompts were: “There is no shadow where there shines no sun,” zombie, all magic comes with a price, and lookalike. 
> 
> I was going to write about Song Lan and Xue Yang, but then I saw a gifset of these two and had feelings.

Thor is on a planet that smells of sulfur and ash when he finds his solution. The planet he's on is a dead one, though it doesn't know it _quite_ yet, a star collapsing slowly inwards on its horizon. It is a slow tick, but a bomb nonetheless.

The citizens of the planet have fled, save for the few frightened, starving animals cowering in the scorched underbrush. Thor pities them, but this universe is a cruel, unjust thing. He cannot save them.

There is a tower on this dead planet, made of black craggy rock. It is a ruin inside, food rotting in the kitchens of the lower levels, blood smeared against the rails of the main staircase. Thor dares not peer into the bedrooms. 

He does, however, find the library. 

It is there that he finds his solution, on a dying planet in the shadow of a dying stair. It is a simple solution. Elegant. Something that he thinks Loki would have approved of, once upon a time. 

He reads until his eyes burn, until the timer at his waist is making increasingly distressed noises. The bomb, he thinks, is due to go off much too soon.

He takes the book with him. And then to be safe, he takes a dozen more like it, thrown into a pack on his back.

On the way back to the shuttle, he encounters one of the creatures he’d seen before. Canine-like, save for the scales. This one is a shade of green so dark it’s nearly black and when Thor comes close it does not cower and bare its teeth. Instead, it looks at him, head cocked, as if considering.

He spares a moment to glance at the star behind him, at the angry brightness of it, the flares coming harder and faster. He is running out of time.

He stoops before the creature and holds out his hand.

When the creature licks it, he is decided.

“All right, mutt,” he tells it, smoothing a hand along its trembling flank. “Come along.”

Thor is at home in space. The solace of it would have bothered him before, he thinks. The coldness. The solitude. The quiet. The man he’d been before could have never gone months without company save for a single mutt from a dead world. That man had thrived on energy, on praise, on the heady glow of life. 

He is less now, Thor thinks. A shadow of his former self. Someone who may have seemed a stranger to anyone that he used to know. 

Thor reads. He dabbles. Experimenting with things slowly, carefully, the way his mother had taught him. He’d never been good at magic. That skill was Loki’s, after all, and Loki’s innate talent for it made Thor less inclined to learn. Eventually, she had stopped trying to teach him.

He’d picked some things up through the years, but mostly it was the sense memory of it. The smell of magic lingering whenever Loki was near, how if you concentrated you could see through the illusion. He knows vague things. So he has filled his tiny spaceship with books, and he has made it his business to know more.

It is a slow going, deeply unrewarding process. Thor fails more often than he succeeds, and before the mutt had come along, he’d decimated two separate ships with his experiments. After mutt, he is more careful.

It takes him years to put the words - the _solution_ \- into practice. The ingredients are strange, and he has to travel in order to find them. And then, there’s the matter of finding a corpse. This takes time as well.

He is choosy, touring the morgues and open graves of dozens of worlds. No one is quite right. He finds dozens of men that could seemingly suit his needs - dark hair licking at pale pointed chins, frozen green eyes staring heavenward. None of them suit him. None of them are Loki. 

Loki’s body, he thinks, has been lost to space. It is out there somewhere, taunting him, frozen in time. But search as he may, he cannot find it.

The mutt grows old. It’s scales turn a muted dark color, its snout paling rapidly. It is not dying, not yet, but it is an everyday reminder that even as Thor spends his days and years worrying at a single problem, a single solution to an unhealed wound, the world moves on.

He finds Loki’s body the year that his mutt dies. 

He exchanges one body for another, trading one corpse to the void of space so he can pull the other one in. Loki, for all that he’s been dead for the better part of two decades, is remarkably preserved. Thor isn’t sure the reason - if it’s the apples they’d once eaten that preserve his skin and muscle and bone, or if it is simply the icy coldness of space. 

Was it luck that Loki’s corpse hadn’t drifted into the orbit of a nearby star and burned up? Or some twist of fate? Some divine intervention?

He washes Loki’s corpse as it thaws, taking a warm rag to skin so cold it burns him if he touches it for too long. When he’s done, he puts Loki into his bed, as gently as he can. He is on a timed schedule now, and there will be no sleeping until the work is done.

Thor works fitfully through the night, assembling jarred ingredients and paging through the books one last time.

It is a solution - simple, elegant. 

The cost is simple: a life for a life, exchanged slowly over time. As Loki grows stronger, Thor will grow weaker. He has little idea of how long it will take him to die. The trade is not an even one, but he is not afraid to make it. Thor has lived a long life. If he lives even a single day with his brother again, it will have been worth it.

In the end, it is… well, it is not easy. 

It is hard and it hurts and Thor's heart throbs every moment with the fear that he will get something wrong. But then, he is on the other side of it. He watches his brother take a breath, then another. 

When Loki’s eyes open, he looks bleary and confused, as if he’d just awoken from sleep. Then his eyes lock on Thor, and his brow crinkles, the faint wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepening.

“Thor?” he asks, and reaches for Thor's face.

Smooth, cool fingers gather wetness from Thor’s cheeks. He hadn’t even realized he was crying.

“Loki,” he says, and his voice cracks, hoarse from disuse.

Loki’s eyes widen, flicking around the small ship - landing on the piles and piles of books, the dirty clothes and dishes. Thor himself is unkempt, his beard thick and his hair knotted. He has not bathed in some time, but had wiped himself down with oiled towels this morning to ensure his stink did not offend his brother.

“Thor,” Loki whispers, pushing himself up on his elbows, feeling for his throat. “What have you done?”

Thor sighs, leaning in to set his brow against Loki’s. He is so very tired. 

“A worthy trade,” he whispers, reaching for Loki’s chest. It is silent still. The heart will not move in the first day, the books had said. It may not beat for years to come, depending on the length of the life traded. But as Thor’s heart slows, Loki’s will begin to beat. Slowly at first, then gaining speed and strength. And then when Thor breathes his last, Loki will live again, truly.

But until then, they have each other. They have the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> [My tumblr](https://callunavulgari.tumblr.com/).


End file.
